Any discussion about GNOME vs. KDE is sure to end in tears. It's basically impossible to discuss which of these two Free desktop environments is better than the other, mostly because they cater to different types of people, with different needs and expectatotions. As such, Bruce Byfield decided to look at the two platforms from a different perspective: if we consider their developmental processes, which of the two is most likely to be more successful in the coming years?

I don't understand what weakness it is that you think KDE has that GNOME does not have. GNOME applications are very poor performers under KDE, because they have to load massive GNOME libraries. Applications such as OpenOffice, Firefox and Thunderbird are the same on both KDE and GNOME, because they basically use the libraries of neither.

What's the difference?

Massive GNOME libraries? Like what? Glib? It's tiny as are most GNOME libraries. In fact I can't quite figure out what massive library you could be referring to. Firefox and OpenOffice actually can use some GNOME libraries if you want to build support for it.

"I don't understand what weakness it is that you think KDE has that GNOME does not have. GNOME applications are very poor performers under KDE, because they have to load massive GNOME libraries. Applications such as OpenOffice, Firefox and Thunderbird are the same on both KDE and GNOME, because they basically use the libraries of neither. What's the difference?

Massive GNOME libraries? Like what? Glib? It's tiny as are most GNOME libraries. In fact I can't quite figure out what massive library you could be referring to. Firefox and OpenOffice actually can use some GNOME libraries if you want to build support for it. "

What is that list of libraries supposed to represent? They are all separate libraries that are only loaded when needed. It would be near impossilbe to find ANY application that loads ALL of those libraries. In fact most GNOME applications rely on only a small subset of available libraries. It's extremely misleading to state that running a GNOME application is going to lead to loading "Massive" libraries. This simply isn't the case.